I don't understand the concept of these massive 'terminals'. Doesn't that kinda contradict the intent of direct A to Z commute? I mean... Shouldn't these things be MUCH smaller (maybe four or five pads) and spread out all over the place? If they intend to make them this big, surely you can't have that many of them, and your 'last mile' problem becomes a 'last 10 miles' problem.

Being that these things are to be automated (over time), you don't really need designated platforms and vehicles. Instead, any vehicle should be able to take you anywhere. If the travelers going to say, Legacy West, happen to show up before those going to Midtown, than they just get on the first vehicle and off it goes.

^I actually pictured something smaller, almost like an express bus stop you see in the burbs. More smaller style Uber lift stops versus fewer large almost airport like terminals. Maybe this is just a concept stop on the journey to reality.

Starting in July, the company will run a fleet of driverless vehicles around Frisco, Texas, a city of 164,000 people on the northern edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Announced today, the six-month pilot—which will keep human safety operators behind the wheel, ready to grab control if the car gets confused or misbehaves—marks Drive.ai’s first large-scale effort to put people in its cars, and the first such deployment in Texas.

Here's further details from a DMN article as well:

The service is made possible through a unique public-private partnership among California-based Drive.ai, the city of Frisco, the Denton County Transportation Authority and the private developments for Hall Park, The Star and Frisco Station. They are all part of the newly formed Frisco Transportation Management Association.

I could very easily see this being something that gets implemented at Legacy West if it's successful up in Frisco. Could we ultimately see something similar to the D-Link that's run autonomously in the near future?

I imagine we will still see the safety drivers paid to sit in the driver seat for the next 10 years. I just don't yet see how a combination of the public perception and actual drivers/pedestrians messing things up will change that factor.

How many landings per hour can the skyports designed by Corgan handle? The way we approached our design allows a lot of modularity and flexibility. There won’t necessarily be a demand for 1,000 landings per hour as an initial investment from Uber’s side. We developed our skyport around a single module that handles 90 landings per hour. Ideally that skyport gets doubled in size into a paired module, which handles 180 landings per hour. The beauty is it’s the same basic building block. Once we hit 180 (landings) it’s real easy for us to continue to scale that by replicating that scaled module up to 1,000 or more landings per hour.

This story has nothing to do with AVs, but discontinuing the Volkswagen Beetle might be a brilliant move if it's later resurrected as a mass-market autonomous fleet, however different it may look.

People will trust a brand that they have this nostalgia for well before some new product they only associate with automation.

Nice looking concept. I love the 'out of the box' thinking, and I think this is just the beginning of the emergence of some cool concepts. Many people seem to be stuck on this image that a car needs to look a certain way, or a truck needs to look a certain way. Now that humans don't need to drive cars any more, it opens up a lot of possibilities.

Autonomous flying vehicles will never be approved by the FAA which is staffed, funded, and controlled by pilots.Watch some Aviation 101 youtube videos to find out how professional flying is - even for private pilots in small airplanes. The idea that Billy Bob from anywhere Texas is going to be allowed by the FAA to fly wherever they wished in an uncontrolled fashion is not going to happen.

electricron wrote:Autonomous flying vehicles will never be approved by the FAA which is staffed, funded, and controlled by pilots.Watch some Aviation 101 youtube videos to find out how professional flying is - even for private pilots in small airplanes. The idea that Billy Bob from anywhere Texas is going to be allowed by the FAA to fly wherever they wished in an uncontrolled fashion is not going to happen.

Who said it would be 'untrolled'? lol

I remember wild flying car concepts from back in the 80's. I've never dug into the details much, but I always figured it would be a much simpler concept to control than freeways. Once you have three dimensions to work with, it gives you a lot more room to operate. It seems like designating specific flight corridors at confined altitudes can easily facilitate a boat load of air traffic.When you factor in autonomous systems (assuming they are proven reliable), it actually becomes more controlled than the traditional version. At that point, it'll be the meatbag pilots with lack of sleep or that stopped at the lounge for a bit too long who you have to worry about.I agree that it won't happen overnight. The generation on charge of this stuff is wary of technology in their day to day lives, much less taking over complex systems that they trained on for years. But to say it will 'never' happen is just silly.